“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose within him. “ Carl Gustav Jung
I have a friend who was on the TODAY show yesterday, because she had the courage to create art from her courage.
Nancy Belmont had a big idea, and she did not let her inner critic find fault with and reject her idea for fear of rejection by others. Instead, she went ahead and asked her former husband to support her, and he did. Together they created this Wall of Courage in Del Ray, a village in Alexandria where I live.
I met Nancy as she was putting up the billboard size blackboard on the main street in Del Ray, and saw the sparkle in her eyes as she held the paint brush which would paint the words I WISH I HAD THE COURAGE TO………
Nancy had said YES to deep desire to express herself in such a way that countless others would be touched. The board has filled up over and over again with words such as “come out,” “become an engineer,” “be a better policeman,” “move to a farm and live off the grid,” “get my PhD,” “write a book,” “speak my truth at work, “ “leave my job,” “leave my marriage,” “fall in love again”…………….all dreams that people hold in their hearts. Nancy would clear the board each day, and by evening, the dreams were back.
Why do so many people want to write what they aspire to? Why were people willing to share things on the courage board that they may never have told anyone before?
Because Nancy’s art touched people in the place they want to grow and expand. She touched the artist in each of the people who took chalk in hand and had the courage to write their desire down for all to see.
In his extraordinary book, The War of Art,” Steven Pressfield writes, “The instinct that pulls us toward art is the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness.” An artist gets in touch with and then gives shape to the deeper longings of humanity.
In truth, we are all artists sculpting our lives either from our regrets or our dreams, our fears or our deep love, our shoulds or our DESIRES. As Nancy’s board so powerfully illustrates, it is natural for human beings to aspire to more and greater vistas of possibility and authenticity.
Each time we say YES to our true DESIRE,
we harness the power of love,
for DESIRE is from our essence, which is love,
the strongest force in the universe.
The new energies are here for us to use and life is the teacher offering us the perfect reflection back each and every moment. It is up to us what we paint on that canvas every day. Hidden beliefs of scarcity must be cleared.
It does take courage to stand up to the saboteur inside who would have us play a smaller game. This sub-personality which all humans have to a greater or lesser degree, has a vibration of scarcity. It could manifest as an addiction, doubt, hiding, emotional drama, and other defenses against living with our hearts wide open, which is what it means to have courage.
It is the joining of the observing masculine and expressing feminine—the masculine within creating a structure—a trellis on which the wild feminine vine of our DESIRES can grow.
What is your art? What wants to be expressed in you? What needs to be fed? Do you need more structure, less?
The urges are there. They are Divine Source Energies—–frequencies that have returned to us now at this time of the Great Remembering. They are the fulfillment of the prophecies, by great teachers such as Pierre de Teilhard Chardin:
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Imagine what your life would be like if the main fuel for all you do were love, and you knew it. You felt it. You consciously harnessed it, for you and for everyone.
How would that change your relationships?
Your work or business?
Your art?
Your purpose?
Your calling?
Your mission.
Your ministry.
Maybe all of the above.
To let nothing stop the creation of art.
Your art.
For the sake of the global heart.
